The demographic center of greater Sydney had been west of Parramatta for at least half a century – and had probably reached Blacktown, by now – but the demise of the historical urban core had begun in earnest only in the thirties, when office space, cinemas, theaters, physical galleries and public museums had all become obsolete at more or less the same time. Broadband optical fibers had been connected to most residential buildings since the teens – but it had taken another two decades for the networks to mature. The tottering edifice of incompatible standards, inefficient hardware, and archaic operating systems thrown together by the fin-de-siècle dinosaurs of computing and communications had been razed to the ground in the twenties, and only then – after years of premature hype and well-earned backlashes of cynicism and ridicule – could the use of the networks for entertainment and telecommuting be transmuted from a form of psychological torture into a natural and convenient alternative to ninety per cent of physical travel.

We stepped out on to George Street. It was far from deserted, but I’d seen footage from days when the country’s population was half as much, and it shamed these meager crowds. Gina looked up, and her eyes caught the lights; many of the old office towers still dazzled, their windows decorated for the tourists with cheap sunlight-storing luminescent coatings. “The Ruins” was a joke, of course – vandalism, let alone time, had scarcely made a mark – but we were all tourists, here, come to gawk at the monuments left behind, not by our ancestors, but by our older siblings.

Few buildings had been converted for residential use; the architecture and economics had never added up – and some urban preservationists actively campaigned against it. There were squatters, of course – probably a couple of thousand, spread throughout what was still referred to as the Central Business District – but they only added to the post-apocalyptic mood. Live theater and music survived, out in the suburbs – with small plays in small venues, or crowd-pulling colosseum bands in sports stadia – but mainstream theater was performed in realtime VR over the networks. (The Opera House, foundations rotting, was currently predicted to slide into Sydney Harbor in 2065 – a delightful prospect, though I suspected that some group of saccharine-blooded killjoys would raise the money to rescue the useless icon at the last moment.) Walk-in retailing, such as it was, had long ago moved entirely to regional centers. There were a few hotels still open on the fringes of the city – but restaurants and nightclubs were all that remained in the dead heart, spread out between the empty towers like souvenir stalls scattered amongst the pyramids at Giza.

We headed south into what had once been Chinatown; the crumbling decorative facades of deserted emporia still attested to that, even if the cuisine didn’t.